Tag: Competition

Everyone’s a Critic

thestuartsadler

Hello!

It looks like it’s been a couple of months since I last blogged which isn’t ideal but I’m not going to make a big thing about it. I remember reading a blog post about blogging no-no’s and one of them was the ‘Oh my gosh it’s been so long since I blogged!’ post, so this isn’t going to be one of those. Of course I can’t exactly ignore the fact that it has been a while… but we’ll just move on like old friends.

So, things have been pretty good for me writing-wise actually. There was of course my competition win at the end of last year which was a huge boost. I have yet to crack open the bottle of champagne I won, but I’ll get round to that soon enough I’m sure! I also celebrated with my writing teacher and fellow alumni of our evening class!

Another part of the prize was to have up to 1000 words of a work in progress critiqued by WriteStars, and this past Friday I finally got round to submitting the first section of a short story I have been writing for the past couple of weeks. To say I am excited about this is a huge understatement, though I’m not sure quite why I’m so looking forward to hearing back from them! They may well tear it to pieces, but let’s hope that’s not the case.

There were a few reasons I decided to send them the short story instead of an extract my my novel. The first was that 1000 words from my novel will only really amount to a quarter of a chapter and I felt it would not give them enough of a taste for the story to appreciate context, characters etc. Conversely, what I have sent them will probably amount to over a quarter of the finished short story, so their comments should help make it a good one (and I plan to enter it into another competition! See what I did there?!).

Having said that, while I had told myself that I was confident I would be able to apply a lot of their comments to my writing and style in general, and therefore use it in consideration against my novel, it did occur to me yesterday that the style of my novel is vastly different to the short story so it may not be so applicable. Still, at the end of the day I am getting a free critique on something I’ve written and I’m still very excited to hear back from them!

As for the novel itself, it is going well also. I finished my procrastination project of writing a chapter by chapter outline of the entire story and have really enjoyed getting started again. I’ve written four chapters and will be starting chapter five perhaps even today! Plus the extra little writing class our teacher arranged at our request are critiquing an extract from the novel this week so I will be getting feedback from everyone in the class which I’m sure will also be very helpful!

Onward and upward as they say!

Ermagerd!

thestuartsadler

Yesterday afternoon whilst sat at work (I work from home), looking forward to the end of the week and intermittently refreshing the competition page of the site I had been shortlisted for recently, I was impatiently waiting for the winner to be announced.

As I had not heard anything further and as the results were due, I figured it likely that the winner and two runners up had been notified by now. I was looking forward to reading the winning stories, and had decided that to be shortlisted was a great achievement for my first ever writing competition.

My phone began to ring and in all honesty I thought it was my mum calling to tell me it was cold or something. I answered.

An unfamiliar voice asked if they were speaking to Stuart Sadler. I told them they were indeed and a few words later the conversation became a bit of a blur of excited gibberish on my part because I had in fact won the bloomin’ competition!

I still can’t quite believe it, but I thought I should probably blog about it!

If you’re at all interested, the website is WriteStars and (for now at least) you should see the competition update in the top right, or you can click here to go directly to the story.

Oh. Em. Gee

thestuartsadler

So just moments after posting that last blog post, I hit refresh on the competition page and there it was in the (longer than planned) shortlist of 10, my name and story title!

At first I was like

forreal

 

 

But then I was all

wow

And then I was just totally

omg

 

 

Unfortunately I have no idea when the final results are announced, so as of now I’m basically

hurry

I guess I’ll let you know!

An update

thestuartsadler

Whoops! It’s been quite a while since I last wrote anything on this blog so my apologies if you have been kept waiting. Work has been busy, life has been fairly busy and I have at least been writing a thing or two, which is why I’m back here tonight. I wanted to do some writing but am too tired to focus on my story so I thought I’d write a blog post instead!

So I’ve done a quick check and the last time I was here I was talking about short stories and my novel somewhat getting away from me to the point where I needed to take a step back. That was a while ago, so here’s the latest!

That first short story was successfully entered and the result (or more accurately a shortlist) is due to be revealed this evening! I have been waiting and refreshing the page several times an hour all evening but alas at the time of writing there is no news yet! I’m not overly confident I’ll make the cut, but you never know! I wouldn’t have entered if I didn’t like my story so we shall see! It’ll be a nice surprise, but I’m not holding my breath!

The second short story (on the theme ‘Dark Matters’) was also finished and sent off, and I was pleased with that too! Unfortunately results aren’t due until January so you may have to remind me to check that one in the new year!

I drafted a third short story just the other night (an open themed competition for a story of ‘exactly 100 words’) which came out of nowhere and isn’t the kind of thing I would normally write so I’m quite pleased with that! After a couple more times staring at it making sure there’s no way I can make it any better (an extremely difficult task when knowing any changes must retain the exact word count!) I’ll be sending that off too! This competition is open till the end of January though so it’ll be a while for that one!

As for the novel, well I went back to basics for sure! I decided I needed more structure and a better idea where I was going, if only to keep myself in check as I write! So I have been chapter outlining. I’m up to about 35 chapters planned so far which I’m pleased with and it’s helped me cement my ideas and the story I want to tell. Of course when it comes time to actually write it (which I’m hoping will be relatively soon as I’m already starting to feel like a part of my brain is just sat in the back saying ‘Yeah, this is progress! Just keep outlining! Keep telling yourself you’re writing a novel, that’s it! Outline 100 chapters if you have to, it’s all progress!’ Which of course it is, and it isn’t. I am fully aware that I am still not writinga novel so yeah, needs work!) I will be happy for the characters to take me in unexpected directions etc. but the main thing is that I have a thread to follow and keep me grounded at least a little.

I’m hoping to write some more blog posts too though. In fact I’m hoping to just do more writing in general!

It’s all progress! 😉